Legend:

Apple's Prores codec is a very good and efficient codec. It's main problem is that one of the industry's main review linux review tools (RV) does not support playback of Prores on any linux platform. In fact, it only supports playback with the 32bit version of RV on Mac OS X. Having said that, the main use of RV is its capability to do frame-by-frame scrubbing, but if this is not a feature that is necessary for the workflow you're trying to achieve, mplayer and other players will happily play back Prores on linux.

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Prores is a 422 codec, with an existing 4444 variation. FFmpeg comes with 3 different prores encodes: "prores", "prores_kostya" and "prores_anatolyi". In our testing we've used the "prores" and the "prores_kostya" encoders and found "prores_kostya" to be the best encoder to use. It is the only one that supports the 4444 colorspace and although it may be slightly slower. The color quality of the videos produced by these two codecs was visually indistinguishable Because of the 4444 support we've decided to go with Kostya's version of prores.

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Prores is a 422 codec, with an existing 4444 variation. FFmpeg comes with 3 different prores encodes: "prores", "prores_ks" (formerly named "prores_kostya") and "prores_aw" (formerly named "prores_anatolyi"). In our testing we've used the "prores" and the "prores_ks" encoders and found "prores_ks" to be the best encoder to use. It is the only one that supports the 4444 colorspace and although it may be slightly slower. The color quality of the videos produced by these two codecs was visually indistinguishable Because of the 4444 support we've decided to go with Kostya's version of prores.

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There are 4 profiles that exist within Prores: Proxy, LT, SQ and HQ (and then optionally 4444). In ffmpeg these profiles are assigned numbers (0 is Proxy and 3 is HQ). See Apple's official Prores whitepaper for details on the codec and information associated with the profiles. For quick reference, the basic difference is the bitrates: (TODO). The other option that is used with prores is the -pix_fmt option. This is normally set to yuv422p10le or something like that, but if you want to use the 4444 prores you would set it to yuv4444p10le. (A list of possible pixel formats can be invoked by running ffmpeg -pix_fmts. Note that not all of these formats are actually supported with prores).

H264 is the newest codec and it seems to be the plumbing that powers all of the videos on the internet. It's extremely efficient at compression - the resulting movie clips are easily 1/10th the size of the same clip made with prores, but it lacks in one critical area. Because of its heavy use of temporal compression, H264 encoded clips are very difficult to scrub frame-by-frame, especially going backwards. It needs to decode frames based on other nearby frames and this is not an easy task. It is very likely that H264 will not be able to be used in reviews that require frame-by-frame scrubbing, but it is an excellent and space-efficient codec for any playback only related workflows. And of course for mobile devices.

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H.264 support in ffmpeg is done through VLC's libx264 which is most likely the best H264 encoder out there. If compiling ffmpeg/libx264 manually, please see some of the excellent guides such as the UbuntuCompilationGuide. Reasonably detailed instructions on the plethora of H264 options can be found in the existing x264EncodingGuide. We will detail some of the missing information in this guide.

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H.264 support in ffmpeg is done through VLC's libx264 which is most likely the best H.264 encoder out there. If compiling ffmpeg/libx264 manually, please see one of the [[CompilationGuide|FFmpeg Compilation Guides]]. Reasonably detailed instructions on the plethora of H.264 options can be found in the existing [[x264EncodingGuide|FFmpeg and x264 Encoding Guide]]. We will detail some of the missing information in this guide.

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Like prores, H264 understands the concept of "profiles". These are basically just encoding presets grouped together in a convenient keyword. Existing profiles are: baseline, main, high, high10, high422, high444. Apple's Quicktime only supports *baseline* and *main* profiles and it only supports the 420 colorspace. There are three types of quality settings for H264: bitrate, -qp and -crf. Bitrate is only useful for 2 pass encoding which is not really the best encoding method for this kind of workflow. -qp is the second one and -crf is the third. -qp and -crf are basically the same, with -crf resulting in a smaller file. [http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings#qp This guide] contains a good writeup and description for these options. Based on testing we found that -crf is definitely the way to go and recommend using -crf as the main quality control parameter for H264 encoded movies. A crf value of 0 produces lossless and very large movies which are unplayable at high (2K+) resolutions. The playback

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problem continues with increasing CRF values, but becomes manageable at around crf 15 and higher. We found that a crf value of 19 produces very good movies with a very small file size and they should generally play back on reasonable hardware (apple laptops made in the last 2-3 years).

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Like prores, H264 understands the concept of "profiles". These are basically just encoding presets grouped together in a convenient keyword. Existing profiles are: baseline, main, high, high10, high422, high444. Apple's Quicktime only supports *baseline* and *main* profiles and it only supports the 420 colorspace. There are three types of quality settings for H264: bitrate, -qp and -crf. Bitrate is only useful for 2 pass encoding which is not really the best encoding method for this kind of workflow. -qp is the second one and -crf is the third. -qp and -crf are basically the same, with -crf resulting in a smaller file. [http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings#qp This guide] contains a good writeup and description for these options. Based on testing we found that -crf is definitely the way to go and recommend using -crf as the main quality control parameter for H264 encoded movies. A crf value of 0 produces lossless and very large movies which are unplayable at high (2K+) resolutions. The playback problem continues with increasing CRF values, but becomes manageable at around crf 15 and higher. We found that a crf value of 19 produces very good movies with a very small file size and they should generally play back on reasonable hardware (Apple laptops made in the last 2-3 years).